About
Visitors click in and out of your website all day long, quietly reading your information, bouncing amongst the pages before they find a link that whisks them off to another site. In fact, they left so quickly, you never even knew they were there!
But your web statistics do…
By capturing every click and some of the bits of information that your visitors leave behind, your web statistics are able to help you paint a more accurate picture of your actual web traffic, track their habits, even help you understand what they liked or disliked about your site.
Using web site monitoring software, webmasters are able to capture valuable information that helps them make informed decisions about what to put on their websites, or what they should avoid in the future.
In its most basic form, web statistics can be seen as a more advanced form of the old “visitor counter” that was seen on so many pages when Internet first gained popularity. Remember those? Half of them didn’t work, and even if they did, they usually had some insane number that refreshed with each click. Nevertheless, they gave a good impression of pages that were “popular”, and those that weren’t.
Today’s web analytics offer much much more than those primitive counters did. Beyond just telling a webmaster how many visitors have stopped by, statistics can be generated on when they came, if they’ve come multiple times, and where they went while they visited.
By tracking things like “most viewed pages”, “click paths”, or “exit pages”, website owners and designers understand more and more each day about who’s looking a their pages, and why.
Web statistics come in all kinds of different shapes and sizes. There are free pieces of software, hosted solutions, small primitive programs and very complete (and many times complex) software packages that can all tell you about who’s on your site. They’re all quite good and can tell you important information, and what’s right for you will probably depend on how much you need to know.
I invite you to read on and find out more about Web Site Statistics and how they can help you understand your own site better.
